Friday, July 1, 2011

Creative Live Sparklers

This is a follow up to my last post about my class at CreativeLIVE about photographing fireworks.

This was the first time I've tried doing a class like this, sitting in front of a camera broadcasting live to who knows how many viewers. I thought that I would be a bit nervous and worried, but sitting across from Susan and Kenna I felt right at home as if I was just having an intimate chat with them about the fireworks. I hope that we can do more of these. Maybe a series of podcasts or something like that.

When I went over my notes yesterday, I felt like I had enough content to fill about 12 minutes out of the 90 minutes we allotted for the class. But it turned out that we went the full 90 minutes without feeling like I was repeating myself. We had a great chat room audience that kept sending in good questions that kept it all lively and interesting for me.

At the end of the class we did a little demonstration using sparklers. What surprised me about the sparklers was how bright they were. As we had been talking about using f/11 to f/16 for fireworks, I was planning to start there with the sparklers. But I quickly realized that we needed to stop down even more. The photos we took were between f/22 and f/32.

Here are a few of the images from this morning's class with some tweaking in Adobe Lightroom. Hope you all enjoyed the class and the images.

Thanks!

Our first sparkler at f/22 for
about 1 second
This one was even brighter,
f/32 for 1 second
We settled in here at f/32 and
I tried zooming the lens here
Another image with the lens
being zoomed during the exposure
Someone in the audience asked us to
do some "light painting" with the sparker
This sparkler was a little less bright, so I opened
Up to f/25 for 3 seconds
Again at f/25 for 3 seconds, but I didn't boost
the blacks this time so Celeste shows up in the middle
Again at f/25 and 3 seconds, I
cropped in a lot on this one

1 comment:

  1. It was such a fun class; thank you! I hope to see more John Cornicello classes in the future! :)

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